Cloud

In many scenarios, public cloud services allow a high grade of elasticity, flexibility and cost effectiveness combined with standardization. On the other hand, every customer needs to build trust to the desired platform and that all his services and data are protected against any attacks. So, it’s very interesting to see, what kind of mechanisms the large cloud providers as Microsoft are using to keep data safe and how they detect attacks and what countermeasures they execute. ...

The Microsoft Graph API is the new unified endpoint for developers accessing data from an Office 365 tenant. Amongst many other features, you can work with OneDrive and SharePoint files with the Graph REST API. Additionally, you can directly work with Excel files through the Graph Excel API. Since all samples I found just use the personal OneDrive for Business (OFB) file storage, I wanted to document how to access files that are stored in a SharePoint Online site (SPO) as well. So, here we go! ...

Holidays are a good time for cleaning up. For migrating an old on-premises file storage to the cloud, I used some tools and invested some time. See my scenario and the tools here. The scenario I had a Virtual Machine (I connected to remote via RDS from my holiday location into the company) with an iSCSI storage to a NAS system where old project files were stored. This storage was used over the last years. You can imagine … the mess. To make it short: In that VM, the file storage was connected with a network drive P: (for Projects). With my work account, I have 1TB personal cloud storage. Since this should be an archive for my coworkers as well, I decided to use a SharePoint Online site (SPO). I created an Office 365 group - with a SPO for storing the documents - named “projects” and installed the OneDrive.exe client. Then, I created a new Document Library and synchronized that (empty) list to the local computer. ...

The free eBook Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure Second Edition is available! The book was written by Michael Crump and Barry Luijbregts, The introduction starts with “why cloud” and covers app development, Azure services and ends with the Azure Marketplace. And it’s free! Get more information at the Azure blog at Free eBook – The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure now available or download it directly from aka.ms/azuredevebook. There’s a lot of current and useful information in that book and many hyperlinks to specific topics in the web. Thanks to the authors and to Microsoft for providing this free eBook. ...

BCP, the bulk copy program utility is still around - and it’s helpful! It’s a long time, since I used this tool, but nowadays it got promoted for one of my daily jobs. See a short description how to use the Microsoft Command Line Utilities with Azure SQL Database for connecting and importing and exporting data quickly. Recently, I had the request to import local data to a SQL Azure database and BCP did the job. Since the tool is handy and very fast, it’s also good for running in a script (but you need to find a solution for storing the credentials…). So, here’s an overview how to use BCP and SQLCMD as quickly as possible. ...

When moving SQL databases to Azure, let Azure do some work for you. As the name suggests, the Azure SQL Database Automatic Tuning feature provides automatic performance optimization for databases. Activate it, it’s simple. Once the data is available in Azure SQL Database, there is no more server maintenance necessary. Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a service that runs in the Microsoft Cloud. With the service there comes a bunch of benefits. One of them is the Automatic Tuning Mode. This enables stable workloads through continuous performance tuning utilizing Artificial Intelligence and applying corrective actions for databases in use. See more at Automatic tuning in Azure SQL Database ...

The new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) comes in force in 6 months. From then on, every business processing personal data has to fulfil the statutory European data privacy laws. A violation can result in high fines and penalties. Within the cost free seminar series “The Art of Data Management”, taking place in Germany and Austria, atwork prepares you for the statutory changes. Our experts pass on a first general insight into the security concept of Office 365 and Azure and tell you how to fulfil the conditions of the new regulation with the help of Microsoft Cloud Services. ...

For testing purposes, having sample data is very helpful. Recently, I stumbled about a useful tool to get sample images for a custom topic quickly. See how to get test images here. So, imagine you need sample images for testing the Microsoft Custom Vision API. How to get sample pictures? Well, there’s a great source for that by Dmitri Soshnikov. at Custom Vision API demo on GitHub. Download the imdownload.exe tools and run this command line executable with a syntax as here: ...

Fall time usually is a very busy time in the IT business. So, we were happy to have a break and be part of SharePoint Saturday 2017 in Barcelona! #SPSBCN took place on the 28th October in beautiful Barcelona (see the details on the SPSEvents.org website here). This event already was the 3rd SharePoint Saturday Barcelona. The venue location at IQS was the same as in the years before. Edin and his team of sug.cat (Grup d’Usuaris de SharePoint de Catalunya) organized the event perfectly and we all had a great time there. ...

Working with Visual Studio Code? Then check out the Azure Functions extension for Visual Studio Code at the Visual Studio Marketplace! Find the extension and description at Azure Functions for Visual Studio Code. The Azure Functions for Visual Studio Code extension allows to create new projects and functions from a template, to debug function apps locally, to view and to deploy Azure functions, to start, stop and restart functions and has Intellisense support for the json-project files. ...